I’ve got loads of recipes to look at, but they’re all different, so I figured I’d ask you guys for the straight dope! I’m gonna go hardcore this time - I’m making my own pie crust and using fresh fruit, but that means it has to be sweet cherries, as that’s what’s available. (I see a lot of recipes for sour cherries - nice, but not useful to me.) Suggestions?
You really need to swing in the kitchen. You’ll find that most people don’t, because they are too preoccupied with complaining. But it is the key to a properly sweet cherry pie.
Hopefully, it will taste so good, it will make a grown man cry.
Sweet, my Cherry Pie!
Put a smile on your face, ten miles wide!
Feel so good, make a grown man cry!
Sweet Cherry Pie!
FYI, cherry pie made with sweet cherries will NOT be the same thing as the cherry pie you think of as cherry pie: that’s always made with sour cherries. Totally different animal.
Yeah, I know, but I wanted to try it and I don’t think I’ve ever in my life seen fresh sour cherries.
I’d just use a recipe for sour cherry pie, cut the sugar by about a third and add a lot of lemon juice.
But I will second lissener and add another warning: it’s not gonna be good. There’s simply not enough acid in sweet cherries to make anything other than a limp tasteless pie.
If I were you, I’d start looking around at the farmer’s markets or in specialty grocers for fresh sour cherries. They’re not that hard to find.
If you combined something somewhat sour or bitter with the sweet cherries, it might even out somehow and make for an interesting flavor. If you made a rhubarb cherry pie with less sugar on account of the sweet cherries, it might actually be good. It would, at the very least, make the taste a little more complex.
Well, most of my recipes are for tart pie cherries, but you might try here:
This is my favorite food site, with a multitude of different search functions, nutritional info, and even special diet recipes. You can change to metric meaurements and back, or alter the recipe to change the number of portions made. Try the “search ingredients” feature, put in sweet cherries, and indicate you want the pie or dessert section to be searched.
Missed the edit window.
Cherries are the feature ingredient just now at the website I mentioned above. And doing the search I came up with the following:
You’d be better off making a pie from canned cherries than from sweet cherries. Pie is too labor intensive to waste on something that you know isn’t going to turn out well.
Well, it did put a smile on my face, if not ten miles wide. Here’s to show you can totally make an awesome pie with sweet cherries (Ranier - not as sweet as Bing, but still sweet.) For the filling you just combine:
6 cups pitted cherries
3/4 cup sugar
1 lemon’s worth of zest and 2 teaspoons of its juice
1/8 tsp allspide
1/8 tsp cinnamon
splash almond extract
bit of brandy
3ish tablespoons quick-cooking tapioca
Let it macerate for 15 minutes or so and put it in the pie uncooked.
However, before you start all this you might just wanna be sure you know how to make a pie crust. 
The one that went in the pie was my third attempt, and the top was overworked and the bottom underwatered. I think I could do a good one, now, after 3 failures. And my dad thought the pie was excellent. (Considering his family makes their own crusts, that’s decent praise.)
ETA - that’s the Cook’s Illustrated recipe, designed for sweet cherries. Recipes (at least ingredients lists, certainly) are fair use.
Well, first you find a girl of pleasant disposition named Cherry.
Date her for a while.
Come to a mutual agreement about pleasurable options.
Spread her legs, and enjoy!
Whipped cream optional.
I am not much of a cook when it comes to things like dinner, but I am great at cherry pie. Sweet cherries, sour cherries, makes no difference.
The secret is to add a couple of teaspoons of lemon juice (yes, even to sour cherries) and if the cherries are sweet, cut the sugar. Even with sour, I never use as much as the recipe says. And about a tablespoon of flour to thicken it all. (This is with about 4 cups of pitted cherries. That is about the entire production of my back yard cherry tree.)
Also, I have had the best luck with pie crust when using a mister to add the water. I use the same one I use for olive oil, just wash it out and add water instead–but, since it’s water, I think any kind of mister would work.
A note: My recipe is for Warrant’s specific version. For all others, follow as the rest of the thread directs.
:rolleyes: Said by someone whose state has a cherry festival 
You are indeed fortunate. The only place that I could find them locally was a U-Pick farm. Luckily it was a great year for them; last year was not so good. I got 27 pounds, or about 9 batches (one batch will make either one pie or one batch of preserves). They started the weekend before the 4th of July, and they have been gone about a week now.
I’ve tried making a sweet cherry pie, and it was a disaster. Not so much because of the sweetness, but because the skins are tougher. I had much better luck buying bottled sour cherries (Morello?) from Trader Joe’s. I forget how many bottles to a pie.